As I sat down today, Sunday, to catch up with some billing, think about recording a Podcast, prep some more blog posts, work out what I want to say in oral evidence to the Parliamentary Immigration Bill committee next week (eek!) and look over yet more pro bono paperwork, this piece by...
At a time of escalating rhetoric by Ministers, with their language of invasion, inundation and insects, a new report by Mapping Immigration Controversy confirms that the main effect of the Government campaigns on immigration are fear and anger, not reassurance. Emotions are stoked not dampened. Mapping Immigration Controversy has been running...
I’m voting Labour today, and I will be spending the day out campaigning for my local candidate, Sarah Sackman. No party is perfect and the last Labour Government was deeply flawed in many ways, particularly in its approach to asylum issues. I resigned my long standing membership of the party...
The image above is of a Californian doctor sobbing outside the hospital building having lost the 19 year old patient on whom he was operating. It has gone viral on social media. It was also picked up in The Guardian in an interesting article by Deborah Orr: The image of the...
It’s pleasing to see that the residents of Derby Road in Southampton have taken a strong stand against the making of ‘Immigration Street’, Channel 4 and Love Productions sequel to ‘Benefits Street’ (a not so much fly on the wall as stir up the hornets style of documentary about the...
For supporters of the No Borders movement, it is an article of faith that borders are an unnecessary interference with human freedom and human nature. Borders by their nature separate people, break up families, hold back economic and cultural development and discriminate between otherwise equal humans on the basis of artificial...
A fascinating study of power play and relationships inside and outside the hearing room has been published as a working paper by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford: The culture of disbelief: an ethnographic approach to understanding an under-theorised concept in the UK asylum system by Jessica Anderson,...
Home Office appeals against first instance judge decisions used to be very rare indeed. Some years ago, it apparently became standard practice to seek permission to appeal in some asylum allowed appeals and all or virtually all deportations cases. It now appears to be standard practice for the Home Office to...
What is a radical lawyer? What I mean by it are those lawyers whose actions and attitudes were largely motivated by a political ideology – socialism and further left; or at least angry lawyers dedicated to fundamental changes to the law, its institutions and the legal system. They were fearless...
Actress and justice campaigner Joanna Lumley has joined her voice to the rising chorus of concern about the catastrophic changes to Legal Aid. She adds her name, forever associated with the legally aided fight for the rights of Gurkhas (not to mention Ab Fab, James Bond and the New Avengers),...
There are three courts at Richmond Mags being used for immigration hearings now but all five will apparently be used for immigration hearings from April. Meanwhile, the family court at Richmond is apparently moving to Hatton Cross, which has been seriously underused for immigration cases in recent months despite the...
Originally posted at the Justice Gap. From as early as the 1880s doctors began to report a truly puzzling medical condition. Eventually named ‘Anton’s Syndrome’, medics noticed that some patients who had suffered a sudden loss of sight continued to deny their blindness, pretending that they could see, constructing ever...
The difference between a recession and a boom, as any legal aid lawyer will tell you, is that during a boom the government cuts legal aid, whereas during a recession they cut everything else as well. There was a timely reminder yesterday from President of the Supreme Court Lord Neuberger...
The new Immigration Bill is a sinister, nasty piece of legislation. Building on man-made laws that define certain humans as ‘illegal’, it seeks to create an even more hostile environment for an already marginalised section of society. People are to be deprived of employment, bank accounts, driving licences, accommodation and...
[UPDATED] In his final judgment in the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Judge has given some interesting guidance given on the role of the advocate in a contentious trial. The case is R v Farooqi & Ors [2013] EWCA Crim 1649 and the judgment is that of the court. The advocate whose conduct...
Self-styled Theresa ‘CRAZY’ May, our esteemed Home Secretary, has unveiled a range of hardline new immigration measures at the Conservative Party conference. I’ve added the capitals, but in relating her little anecdote about Abu Qatada she seems happy enough to be associated with the moniker: I was told a story by one...
The horrific news of sexual abuse by private security contractors at Yarlswood, the female-only immigration detention centre near Bedford, is awful and shocking. It is very far from the first time that problems or outright abuse at Yarlswood has been reported, though. Various examples from 2009 onwards can be found here, here, here,...
One overlooked solution to the one way asylum fast track to refusal and removal is to seek an injunction preventing consideration under the fast track process. This option should be seriously considered where the client has good grounds for asserting that a premature refusal decision by the Home Office will...
Professor Stephen Meili of the University of Minnesota Law School has written a very interesting article entitled U.K. Refugee Lawyers: Pushing the Boundaries of Domestic Court Acceptance of International Human Rights Law for the Boston College Law Review 54 B.C.L. Rev. 1123 (2013). It is fascinating for we UK refugee...
It is finally almost upon us: the transfer of judicial review claims from the High Court to the Upper Tribunal will take place on 1 November 2013. In addition, applications for permission lodged after 9 September 2013, including those where permission has been refused on the papers and oral renewal...
Really useful and concise best practice guide for country experts in asylum and immigration cases in the United Kingdom by Anthony Good and Tobias Kelly. Immigration lawyers would be well advised routinely to provide this to their experts. It covers the legal framework including the practice direction on expert evidence,...
The legal action initiated by David Miranda through UK solicitors Bindmans brings into sharp focus an issue that has been troubling me since the Snowden revelations began: how can a lawyer acting against government be sure that privileged communications with his or her client are not being read by that...
My client today applied for a spouse visa in May 2012. A refusal was eventually issued in November 2012. The appeal took place today, 14 months after the application and 8 months after the refusal. The hearing took 20 minutes and it was allowed there and then by the judge....
I recently suggested that the new name for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate Border and Immigration Agency UK Border Agency remains unknown. That is not really true, it turns out, and we are not expected to carry on treating it as the bureaucratic equivalent of The Scottish Play. It is...
Last week saw the anniversary of the miserable new family immigration rules, introduced on 9 July 2012. Heartache and anguish was predicted and has, tragically, come to pass. I attended and spoke at the demonstration outside the Home Office co-ordinated by JCWI, MRN, Brit Cits and others. It was, frankly,...
Today the closed material procedure for evidence in civil trials comes into effect. This excludes one of the parties from the proceedings, meaning that they do not get to see the evidence relied on by the other party. It violates one of the basic tenets of fair trial and it...
A new Freedom of Information request has revealed that British women have been affected disproportionately compared against men by new minimum income rules for spouse and partner applications. There has been a 20% drop in the female-sponsored proportion of applications made, which suggests that women have been disproportionately put off...
If the cuts to the scope of legal aid brought by LASPO 2012 have been significant, the cuts proposed by the Ministry of Justice in the recent consultation “Transforming legal aid: delivering a more credible and efficient system” would be severe. It is of particular concern that the Government has...
At Renaissance Chambers we have been involved with a number of recent Afghani and Pakistani (Ahmadi) charter flight cases and injunctions. I have noticed a couple of things that are troubling me. Firstly some of the factual immigration summaries prepared by the Home Office omit references to previous fresh...
Sir John Thomas has given a further warning to solicitors and barristers acting in urgent injunction applications. The case is R (on the application of Rehman) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2013] EWHC 1351 (Admin). No names are named this time, at least not so far: In the present...
I recently twisted Margaret Phelan’s arm into arranging for me to receive a Kindle copy of the latest (and greatest) edition Phelan and Gillespie’s Immigration Law Handbook, known to all immigration lawyers as the bench book for immigration law. I am well accustomed to thumbing through the hard copy version...
Legal aid work has, paradoxically, always felt like both a duty and a privilege. A duty because the rates of pay are much lower than for private work and, arguably, even artificially depress private rates. The still recent across the board 10% cut in legal aid rates merely exacerbated that...
Immigration detention dehumanises not only the detainee but also every person who deals with it. It is a poison that infects us all. The professionals who deal with detainees and their families develop coping mechanisms. We convince ourselves that detention is necessary, that there is no alternative, that it is...
Excellent but awfully depressing article by Jo Renshaw of Legal Aid Lawyers of the Year 2012 firm Turpin & Miller in the New Law Journal on the effect of LASPO: …The list of casualties among those who are often the least able to fight their own corner is long and depressing. There...
In preparing my two year old toddler son for another trip to the swimming pool on Saturday morning, I suddenly realise that I am teaching him how to remember details, what are the important or ‘right’ details (by my reaction when I laugh or smile at the answer) and how...
